Wario Land 4 Review

Mario has long seemed to be an afterthought in the handheld market. After Super Mario Land 2, every traditional Mario platformer released on a Nintendo handheld was a port and/or a remake until New Super Mario Bros. on the DS. Who stepped up to take his place? None other than Wario. Starting on the original Game Boy, Wario had a string of four platformers, ending with this one on the GBA. Why, you may ask, am I going back to review this game so many years after its release? Simply because it wasn’t until recently that I acquired a copy of it and I noticed that we didn’t have a review of it. Anyway, on to the review.

The plot of Wario Land 4 is quite simple. A pyramid has been discovered in the middle of a jungle, a temple with a lot of treasure in it. Unfortunately, accidents prevented scientists from finding said treasure. Of course, no accident is going to keep greed incarnate, also known as Wario, from all that loot, so he gets in his car and off he goes. It’s not exactly going to win an award for most creative story, but at least it explains how Wario ended up in the temple in the first place.

Wario Land 4 is a Nintendo release, so it should come as no surprise to anybody to find that this game has good graphics for its time. Wario looks like the evil, greedy man he has always been, is colored and animated well. The environments he is in are likewise appropriate as well as quite diverse. The different environments make sense for the names of the levels that they’re in. Overall, there’s nothing to complain about in these graphics.

In terms of sound, this game has everything that could possibly be asked for in a GBA platformer. The music is up to Nintendo’s usual high quality and is often quite catchy. Even more impressive is the fact that the music often changes when Wario’s being affected by a status change (more on this later). The sound effects might not be anything overly creative, but they work well nonetheless. And best of all, we’ve got one-liners of voice acting from Wario. Granted, by the time this game came out, voice acting on the GBA had been precedented on Super Mario Advance, but this game was released fairly early into the GBA’s run, so the presence of voices is still quite impressive. Overall, the sound is also done very well.

In terms of gameplay, Wario Land 4 is nothing like a Mario game. Wario is just so much more talented than Mario is. Not only can Wario walk and jump, he can also do shoulder charges and do a special fast run that can be quite destructive. With Wario, destruction is the name of the game, and many of the puzzles in the game will require you to destroy quite a few objects in order to advance. This isn’t your typical left-to-right platformer like the Mario series either. The levels are more maze-like and more thoughtfully laid out than that.

The temple is laid out in four different passages (okay, five if you count the entry passage, but the entry passage is nothing more than a tutorial level). Each passage contains four levels and a boss, as well as a place where you can play some mini-games with all the coins you’ve collected in the levels if you so desire. In each level, Wario’s objective is to enter the level, find four pieces of one of the four stones guarding the door to the boss of the passage the level is in, and find the key to the next level.

Oh, and one other thing, get out of the level. This may sound easy, but it isn’t. In each level, there will be a marker that Wario will have to hit to reopen the passage that he used to come into the level. Often, this marker will be found before all four pieces of the stone are found, and occasionally before the key to the next level is acquired. When Wario hits this marker, not only will the passage be reopened, but a time limit will appear on the screen. Wario must make his way back through the level, almost always by a different route than he used to get to the marker (they couldn’t make this too easy for you) and reach the marker within the time limit.

I’m not sure if the previous Wario games had such a requirement or not, but it certainly makes the end of each level interesting, especially when you get lost somewhere along the way. On the bright side though, you’re usually given significantly more time to get back to the passage than you would need if you made your way back perfectly as fast as possible, so there’s significant leeway here.

The four passageways each seem to have their own theme, much like the six areas in Super Mario Land 2 for the Gameboy, the most recent direct predecessor of this game I’ve played. The themes are quite diverse, but some of them seem out of place for a game that’s supposed to be taking place in a pyramid. That’s a minor complaint though. The levels are laid out quite well, and the enemies are also quite creative.

One thing that really sets Wario Land 4 apart from Mario is that there are puzzle elements in it. A lot of times it’s no difficult than figuring out which block to break and how to break it, but Wario often has other tricks in his arsenal. Objects such as flying carpets might be lying around occasionally to use for transport, but often Wario will have to rely on status changes to solve puzzles. Whether it be colliding with a bat to turn himself into a bat, eating something that looks like a coconut to make himself really fat and thus heavy, or getting hit by a hammer to become a spring, there are many such status changes in the game. They all are quite creative and execute well, and they add a lot to the puzzles in this game.

This might not be the longest game in the world, but it is certainly long enough, especially if you have to go through a level more than once to look for a stone piece that you missed. Add to that the fact that it is quite a fun game and the result here is a game that is well worth the time of any platformer fan. Since the game is quite old now, it can probably be acquired quite cheap if you look in the right place. I myself, when I bought it a few months ago, only paid $5 for it at a Gamestop. For that price, there is no legitimate reason why you shouldn’t play this game.